B-sides and rarities.

July 14, 2015

I got sober in Black-Eyed Susan season. They were everywhere that summer like they are right now. I hold onto images of them like I do this daily shot I got to be alive and heal with a solid, focused percentage of my thoughts and actions. Because the way I lived before is a shitty way to live, and a tremendously shitty way to die. I have watched it happen and it is ugly and devastating, and I still can't believe as much as I do see and comprehend that I got a second chance. Two years ago today I got just enough grace to help me save myself. I can't and don't bother quantifying how much; it was just enough. Sometimes I think of it as a crack in a door or a window, others it's just something that happened. One day things were like they were and then they changed. The flowers have marked that before and after for me. They really were what gave me the most hope at first, still are some days.

I certainly cannot understand why this happened, either. One minute I was standing in the rain in the dark on a curb on an ill-advised late night walk to a bar when it occurred to me for the first time that I really didn't have to live this way. This was a quiet, revolutionary, and totally uncomfortable thought. I absolutely believed I had to live that way because I didn't think I could stop it, and I was afraid of all of it, and of everything. It was something I thought would play out until I stopped breathing, and if you want the definition of desperation I don't have a better one in my lived experience.

Luckily that thought returned the next day in a bathroom stall at work where I was stuck in panic and physical withdrawal. That was when I got a kick in the ass from a power I call Ozzy (because who has taught me more about resilience in sobriety, really? I grabbed onto him as a heavy metal Linus blanket at 19 days because I needed something to talk to and he has stuck with me the whole way) and I asked for help with words that sounded like nothing intelligible in my usual vernacular. Words had actually started to get really fuzzy for me at that point, both retrieving them from my brain and stringing them together, which if you are familiar with me at all you can imagine was a particularly terrifying bottom.

To say I asked for help is generous. I recently stumbled across a Gchat from that day with a person who helped in that chat to save my life after I emerged from that bathroom stall. Mostly I wanted to talk about a person I had a crush on and oh by the way, should I stop drinking? Can I even do that? And will I write again if I do? Never mind that I hadn't really been writing for awhile and wasn't going to be able to do anything at all soon because I'd be dead, but would I write again? I had no idea how to ask for help much less receive it, especially with a process that I fully believed was doomed to fail, because I had many years of evidence of this.

Yes. She said yes to whatever she needed to, I know that now, and that meanwhile I had to take care of myself, so could I try to start do that? Whatever she said gave me the courage to message one more person to help me on the ground in my town, and I got to learn that I was wrong and that it doesn't matter what the specific words are when what's happening to me is not in my hands, thankfully.

There is a line in a Tracy Chapman song called "Change": "When everything you think you know makes your life unbearable would you change?" I put it on the playlist I made during my first 90 days of sobriety, a time of the beginnings of neural rewiring that for me required a lot of music. (Oddly, I listened to a lot of Kenny Chesney, too, and that dude talks about beer constantly. Brains are so weird. Kenny is still my little pocket boyfriend from that summer, bless him.) Anyway, often times the answer to Tracy's question is no, I think, for humans. But when something twists and it becomes a yes out of nowhere the outcomes can be a real trip way beyond where any drink can take you. At least that is how it has been for me.

I don't believe in sugar-coating this experience, because the stakes are too high and the reality is too terrible for so many people. I also believe in talking about it on occasion, for the same reason. 88,000 people are estimated to die from alcoholism each year, and 2.5 million with alcoholism as a contributing factor. I'm sure these reported numbers are low, because let's face it, no one wants to talk about it, I'm guessing that most people lie about it when questioned, and it's amazing that it ever gets written down at all. The first doctor who handed me a pamphlet and dared to suggest that I not continue to "pull a Lohan" with my life was a superhero, because he didn't care if he pissed me off and he didn't laugh off my situation or think I was beyond help or a bad person. He saw a problem after knowing me for five minutes that I wasn't able to articulate except with every action I took and word I said, and when I finally woke up months later I remembered that he tried. Just because we don't appear to be listening in the moment doesn't mean it's not making a dent. It's good to try anyway.

Alcohol is everywhere and nowhere. These numbers that have been counted up by the government--88,000 potentially destroyed lives, multiplied by the many thousands more in families that are destroyed in myriad ways from addiction--would be more surprising if it weren't for how intricately and effectively alcohol is woven into our cultures and our commerce, and what a great reputation it has as a facilitator of everything from tolerating the passage of time (I LOVED your birthday! And mine! Whoooo!) to calming nerves that it ultimately destroys to making everything just a little more fun and tolerable, like, say, opening your email or living another day, let's be real.

Yet it is still much more precarious to identify yourself openly as a person who cannot tolerate alcohol in your body than it is to stumble around a bar or a backyard or your own living room wasted. This is just the truth. One revolution can be hashtagged with hearts and smileys and martini glasses, and one really shouldn't be discussed at all. I understand why this is but I still think it is backwards.

Nobody told me this could be the way it turns out when I had my first beer at a party, because a good percentage of the world's population can ingest alcohol without incident. There are people who don't even drink! I always looked at those people suspiciously, like they were either proselytizing missionaries out to steal my wine (newsflash: they mostly do not care about my wine) or professional joy killers looking like they were just sitting there minding their own business, but demons sent to torment me all the same. Turns out they just don't drink. Wild. Meanwhile I was just holding on unwittingly for a ride I was chemically and psychologically unable to tolerate, and when the shit hit the fan I got lucky after I looked really unlucky for a very long time.

I am so grateful today that the word sounds inadequate but it's still the best one I have. My life is full of real generosity, kindness, brilliance, and honesty from so many people. So much love, and I can even feel it most of the time. Things have gotten better while they have often looked messier in the process. I said to a friend the other day that sometimes I feel like I'm living in a middle-aged afterschool special, which given how obsessively I watched them as a child makes some twisted sense. Usually what happens at the end of those is that your counselor Valerie Bertinelli (or the like, but I like to imagine her) who is wearing a jumper and a Peter Pan-collared shirt and probably clogs fixes everything. People on the internet were my first Valerie Bertinellis. So I like to make it perfectly clear here, in case anyone reading needs Valerie Bertinelli too (and who doesn't, really?):

If you think that you cannot stop doing something that is killing you, I know that feeling really well. And if you get a break in that mental action, even for five minutes, I swear to you that that is long enough to try to let the light in. If you want not to do whatever it is just a little bit more than you do, that's a start. Sometimes it's the whole thing. Find me here, if you'd like, (I am also at lauriesays@gmail.com) or find someone you trust who is near you. Someone wants you to be okay, even if they don't know who you are yet. It's the best thing I've had the chance to learn in two years, so I like to throw it out there from time to time.

July 02, 2015

I have spent my life in and around places where seemingly limitless electricity and bright lights are the norm.

I have spent a good bit of my photographic life looking for places where the sun's light shines down just so, striking people, places, and things in the way that makes them more beautiful than they may already be--to my eye, anyway. Everything is subjective. I didn't connect with studio lighting instruction in photo classes. I admire people who can do great indoor work with no natural light, but I wasn't up for the challenge of metering, calibrating, shooting, and then changing it all again for the next shot, over and over again. The results of this work are often stunning. It just doesn't work for me. I love telling stories and framing scenes. The technical details are often lost on me.

It has never been difficult for me to find light when I want it, though--inside or out. I am so absolutely dependent upon electricity flowing freely through my house and all of the places I go outside of it that just how dependent doesn't even occur to me to until it is gone. When my town loses power, it's a newsworthy event. When the power source falters in my house I keep using up electricity on my phone so I can share the tragedy that is me having no electricity with my social networks. Insanity. I run around looking for candles and flashlights. I wonder how I'm going to occupy myself with real things like books and conversations with actual humans until I can plug back in. I deal with practical matters of food storage and perhaps the loss of a heat or cooling source. Overall it's an entirely manageable situation.

But mostly I wonder how long it's going to take until it comes back on. How long is it going to take these people whose job it is at the power company to keep the lights on to make this happen, already?

Taking electricity so deeply for granted is why my gratitude lists lately include things like "I turn on a faucet and water comes out. Awesome." "I flip a switch and a light comes on." Because the truth is that 19 percent of the world's population -- or 1.3 billion people -- has no access to electricity at all. One.org informs me about so many critical needs around the world, and one of those is the need for safe, affordable electricity in sub-Saharan Africa. I didn't even know what "energy poverty" meant before I read One's significant material. Now I know that it's a frightening situation that affects millions of African people.

Health care is hugely affected. More than 30 percent of clinics in sub-Saharan Africa--serving approximately 235 million people--are without electricity. I try to imagine life in my city if doctors could only provide services before sundown; if surgeries weren't guaranteed a consistent light source, or if communications between health care providers weren't guaranteed. This is the norm in Africa, and it affects the health--and let's get real, the survival--of millions of people.

Because power is in limited supply, people must cook inside over open fires or from kerosene sources. This is dangerous and unhealthy.

This is the problem. I like to think quickly about solutions. So I'm thrilled to be a part of One's Light for Light Campaign this month. Throughout July some of your favorite photobloggers will share their favorite light-filled photographs. In exchange, we'll be asking you to sign the petition to encourage lawmakers to pass the Electrify Africa bill. My friend Karen kicked us off yesterday with gorgeous shots of her trip to Malawi.

Last year, the House and the Senate both introduced bills that would help bring electricity to 50 million people in Africa for the very first time. Unfortunately, they didn’t pass, but there is another chance this year. The House just introduced The Electrify Africa Act. It's important to tell Congress just how important this bill is, how important it is to #ElectrifyAfrica. So please sign the petition to support the Electrify Africa Act.

I shot my very favorite light-filled pictures on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, just outside of San Diego. They are a matched set taken minutes apart during the very same sunset. The top image hangs where I can see it first thing every morning, because it makes me think especially of powerful forces and beautiful things.

Speaking up for people who --literally-- do not have the power to advocate for themselves is a powerful force, and a beautiful thing. And for those of us who have a continent's worth of electrical and media outlets at our disposal, it's really, really easy. So I encourage you to sign the #ElectrifyAfrica petition. Follow the #ElectrifyAfrica hashtag on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Use it yourself. Share this post, and share your own favorite light-filled image on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter, and tag it #ElectrifyAfrica and #LightforLight. Visit Heather Barmore's site tomorrow for her images and thoughts about this crucial initiative.

It's the most light-filled time of the year in North America. I'm looking forward to seeing yours.

June 16, 2015

I'm pretty sure I did everything wrong about teaching English this semester except listening to my students and helping them learn how to formulate their ideas more clearly and with more depth. I really love these conversations with young people who are learning to write better. Critical thinking isn't something you're necessarily born knowing how to do, especially in an immediate gratification salad bar of a society. Someone has to care enough to engage you in discussions that involve options beyond the kind you find on a multiple choice test. Okay, so you think that, but why? What would you do if someone asked you to defend your idea with facts and solid rationale? How will you respond when someone disagrees with you? You might not be able to immediately form responses to these questions . You might need some practice. You have to go a little deeper here.

When they're lost in formulating a good argument I tell them to go to the ultimate: asking for a raise. Money is a motivator and as close to a universal concern as I can get in this environment besides "we're all going to die", and this is not a philosophy course. How do you effectively justify not just your need for more cash from an employer, but how much you deserve it? This tends to wake them up a little.

I pulled a particular really smart but scattered student aside one day so we could talk more about his paper topic. He had the look that many of mine do--scattered not just from a state of being, but from life, which is to say he's managing too much of it and trying to go to school at the same time. He told me, after some talk about a safe topic that he didn't care about, that he really wanted to argue his belief that as an African-American teenager he was ultimately responsible for the outcomes of any interactions he had with police. His job was to be respectful, calm, and obedient if approached by law enforcement, and things would turn out in his favor. He wouldn't be arrested, especially wrongfully, or, God forbid, injured or killed like so many of his peers he has seen lately in the media. He would keep his head down. He would not act up. He would survive.

He shared a time he and some friends had been walking around in a nearby college town in the early morning hours. They were doing nothing and had nothing with them, he said, that would cause any trouble. Police had approached them anyway, asking why they were there and where they were headed. His friend who mouthed off made it worse for all of them. It made B nervous. He wished that his friend would shut his mouth. B kept quiet through the whole thing, and eventually they were allowed to move along. He liked to think that his behavior had made things better, that if his friend had been alone it would have turned bad. Using his head had worked so far, and he had to believe that this would continue.

I told him that if he could find some data to back it up, he had a valid argument for this particular assignment, and at the very least he could try. He needed to talk to people, and read commentary about this big, big issue carefully. He needed statistics about law enforcement interactions and crime rates, race and violent encounters incarceration percentages and cause and effect. We talked about qualitative research and how it's tough to argue a point that is based solely in feelings and anecdotal evidence, at least in an academic setting. This wasn't friends sitting around hashing over a belief; this was an argumentative research assignment.

I told him that I very much wanted his argument to be true, but our wishes weren't the point in this context. His job was to scan facts that might make it difficult to prove in addition to an easy case, because that is what you have to do when you're formulating a solid argument. It's almost more important to prepare for the counter-argument, to have a response prepared when someone comes for your idea and tells you you're wrong, as they almost certainly will, especially on a charged topic.

As I listened to him my heart broke while my womp-womp teacher mouth talked arguments and claims, counter-arguments and rebuttals. I thought I knew already what he'd find out, but it wasn't my job to decide that or influence him or discourage him from seeking answers. Sometimes my job is to hate a truth and witness it anyway, to balance intellect and emotion. Critical thinking, I guess.

But the not-so-secret is that the classroom ultimately teaches me hardest, and this was a tough one. I had walked the streets he talked about in that town he referenced, and the people I was told to fear were people who looked like my student, not the police, unless I was told to fear them catching me driving my car from a bar if I'd been drinking. I was supposed to fear the police doing their jobs, if I were legitimately breaking the law. This is an entirely opposite situation from B's. This is a different kind of life. This is the privilege people often claim isn't real, because it's uncomfortable. Because it is real.

A week or so passed before we talked about B's paper again, a week I spent watching the news and reading hashtag threads from a different perspective. I took a picture of a covertly racist billboard about prison, of all things, on a weekend trip to Tennessee. I walked by a #policelivesmatter bumper sticker and sighed. I favorited tweets that supported his claim. I spent a day in Baltimore and watched protests from a distance on the news. I did not feel optimistic for his research. I told myself it was important for him to process through this.

When we sat back at the same table, we brought up nearly simultaneously that the news was making his point more difficult to prove. We talked about Freddie Gray, who had just died in Baltimore after an attack by police. We discussed Walter Scott, who had been shot in the back earlier in the month in South Carolina while running from police. I told him to consider the concept of kairos that we'd discussed in class, that timing--in a day, a relationship, a culture--has an impact on how your argument is received. What a time and place we were living in for this discussion, and also just for living. B said he was a little discouraged and I told him I was too, honestly.

"I'm starting to think that my ideas about this might not be so true, Professor."

I wasn't told in graduate school that sometimes, sitting across from a student, I would want to tear the world I barely understood myself apart with my bare hands. I never foresaw wishing for the ability to reach back with an eraser through hundreds of years of institutionalized hatred and violence, and now through a mass of rhetoric and acquittals, wiping away garbage in search of some basic decency and promise for the many--many, many--kids who cross my path, so many of them just trying to get an education they're told will help them on to better things, who are going to the movies, who are working to pay their cell phone bill and probably part of the rent and for their tuition and books too while they're taking too many credits at a community college for the load they carry outside.

I wasn't taught but have gained from experience a wish to want to be more to them than a representative of a group of people who will never let them up for air, while knowing I can only do my part to be better than they have experienced from others. I want to be the opposite of patronizing or contrived do-gooding, and obviously in stark contrast to any shaming and erasing they have experienced. I want to be a person who listens and guides, who hears their experiences and doesn't respond until they are finished speaking. I want to be a person who doesn't babble out words when none will do.

I told B that I was inclined to believe that he was correct, that he was learning an important, difficult truth, that our research often proves us wrong more than it confirms what we go in believing. I asked him if he felt okay about going back to his plan b, discussing the positive impact he believed that body cameras and other information-gathering equipment could and did have on the treatment of people of all colors by law enforcement officers. He said he felt like that would be more useful at this point, and he'd move on with it. We were both sorry he had to.

Topics aside, B is a talented writer who knows a little bit more than he did in January about how to get a point across, even if--hopefully especially if--he doesn't like what he sees or learns. He dropped his folder off right on time on the last day, a camera around his neck, fresh from shooting a friend's high school graduation. He is a resolute guy with some solid plans for the summer, who knows what to take in the fall. He has my e-mail address and a phone number if he needs a letter of recommendation, because I told him I left college with exactly zero of them and that's a terrible idea. I told him I'd write him one for anything, and that it would all be true.

He said that he'd been thinking, and he still considers himself responsible for his own behavior, but he is more aware now that it might not make the difference he'd like. He still likes to think that doing what he knows is right will up his chances of a positive outcome if he has to deal with police, which he does not want to do at all, you know? Who does? He thanked me for listening to him, and for being cool, and I did not cry until he left.

I admire this guy so much. I feel so fortunate that he crossed my path. I want him, down to my core, to be successful, and to be safe.

I get to do this job. Kairos in this case, in my life as a teacher and a person who absorbs a lot of news and has been feeling quite helpless about it all, means I got to sit in a classroom with a young black man before and after he critically scanned the environment, coming to grips with the realization that the outcomes of a scary situation may be out of his control simply because of who he is and not what he does. I thought that I understood that before, but I really didn't. B's plans for the summer are more solid than mine. I'm still, quite honestly, thinking about what to do next.

January 16, 2015

The new year can be a different circle of hell on the internet for an addict. The holiday season is bad enough, what with the world drinking all over the place like we do on April Tuesday afternoons or whenever, and all of those ads for parties and presents with bottles as phallic symbols or vaginas or boobs wrapped in tinsel and ribbon. Everyone pretending to be alcoholics and calling it a-wassailing, basically. Drink drink drink whooo!

But normal people can do this. Complain about hangovers as temporary states of affairs, and alcohol calories as a time-limited indulgence, not a dietary staple. Because then it's January, and they--we're--supposed to give it up. Just stop. Don't do that drinking thing anymore. What are you thinking, with all of that eggnog and whatever else your lush ass has been pouring down its throat since Thanksgiving like you're allowed to just pour such things down your throat without a calendar-driven expiration date?

And it's not just drinking. People are giving up sugar now, too. Pouring the gluten, if there is any left anywhere, down the trash chute with the turkey and figgy pudding remnants. No more dirty food, either. Everyone is clean eating. Plus definitely no more shopping, I don't even care about those e-mail subject lines from all of your favorite retailers in January, about killing winter blues with fire and your debit card.

Stop it. Stop doing all of the things that you did with reckless abandon in December, when you were allowed. Except do the things you're supposed to start now. Because you're supposed to start working out like a lunatic. The worldwide warning went out that it's January, and that means yoga and spinning and treadmilling as if your very life depends upon it. (There is no space in yoga, all of everyone's dirty mats are touching because happy new year!)

It's insanity, is what it is. It could drive a regular person to drink, and for sure an alcoholic like me, who never needed any excuse anyway.

All of the years I lived in active alcoholism on the internet (oh, to erase caches and delete whole years of digital babble, if only) I tried to play along, mostly because I felt like I had to, and if I did, maybe that meant I didn't have a problem. Because a big part of being a slave to addiction, for me, was pretending -- that things were okay when they weren't, that I was just like you, my friend who could drink one glass of wine and "be done" or "not be in the mood" for more, who could actually be motivated enough by the promise of weight loss to cut down, or, more unthinkable, even stop.

What in the actual hell? What does that even mean? I can't even buy one green pepper, as an old roommate noted who pointed out that I needed two of everything, it didn't matter what. Two, like my vegetables or butter pats or what have you needed a buddy. Certainly my drinks did. They needed a whole tribe, a murder of glasses of wine. When people have one drink, I look on in awe, like how did you happen?

I haven't had any drink of any kind for 18 months, which is a long time for a person like me. And this holiday season was almost weirder than last year's, which was my first one sober in my adult life. This one was, if this were a Friends episode, The One Where We're Really Not Drinking This Was Not a Drill. And after it was over, when January 1 rolled around, and the people who'd been posting themselves with goblets and steins full of pure, unadulterated alcohol for two months, and also cookies and slabs of various barks and the like, started going full-on Whole 30 clean eating CrossFit sign up that I realized the difference between (probably almost all of) them and me. (Although I'm not equating alcohol addiction with food or exercise issues, which is another post.) I also remembered how upset I used to get when I realized that even if I wanted to? I couldn't stop what I was doing on January 1 any more than I could have stopped it on any other day until I was ready. I used to negotiate mentally with the South Beach diet induction phase -- like, how could this work for me except for the no wine part? The answer for me, unfortunately, was not more treadmill time. Tried that. Wine is a sugar-saturated weight loss impeding asshole, basically, one that I could absolutely not give up.

Because I needed it. It wasn't a choice. And I believe (although I am not a sugar or addiction or anything scientist, just a person with an experience) that if you are a true addict, you won't necessarily be able to stop doing it, whatever it is, either, because the internet says. It doesn't mean you are a worse person than your Facebook friend who is down to gnawing at the fairy dust in the air in front of her because she's cut out that devil gluten AND wine (oh, how blithely they're all "no wine for 30 days," hahaha) and emojis and joy. Until alcohol had kicked my ass the exact amount it needed to to kick down the door of my "I can't" to some version of "I can, I think, maybe", or at the very least "I have to because I'm going to die soon if I don't and somehow I don't think I really want to all of a sudden, wow, crazy", I couldn't have done it. Maybe some people can. I'm sure there are stories somewhere of someone's sobriety kicking off with a dare, but mine sure didn't. The stories I read just made me angry, and sad, and looking at a failure in the mirror who'd go to 90 minutes of hot yoga and then home to an empty apartment and a thwarted plan not to pour two bottles of wine down my throat.

I didn't really want to do that dance anymore, not after it started hurting so badly, and I suspect that no one else does either. I believe that to my core. And I believe that now from a place where I read these yearly January marches to dietary minimalism and vice reduction and know that not even the best intentions and solid gold wishes could have made me successful at them. I want to hug anyone who is reading along and feeling like she should be able to be better, that her insides should look more like other people's outsides, that a hashtag and an Instagram challenge should save her from herself. I'd go back and hug me, if I could, although that sounds weird so maybe not. All I have today is the knowledge that my recovery didn't turn on a calendar page, which is good to know because it means I get it, that I'm strong now, that I always was, really, I was just walking the road until a miracle dropped down into a hellish day in July and said I was done.

November 19, 2014

365 days ago I was hung over for the last time since then. (I hope so, can't say ever because I'm not a clairvoyant wizard.) It wasn't a remarkable hangover. That one happened on a scary day earlier in the week, the day I decided that this was the end, one way or the other, and as pointless as it felt at the time, I decided to give the better, less sad option a crack.

Today I woke up and read some stuff and went to see some people about some things, and I felt pretty good about it. I didn't feel good about much most Sunday mornings for a long time. Or Saturday mornings. Or your random Wednesday mornings. That's different today. That's good.

Yesterday I went back to the place I was on the last day I ever drank, in some kind of pilgrimage to a self I remember, very carefully and intentionally without dwelling on her, because it's important not to forget how wrecked this life was should I ever get any brilliant revisionist ideas about that. The whole past month and some change (because things really started to get bad from May on, after a years-long slide downward into terrible) has been a constant, evolving flashback, varying between fuzzy old-time newsreel and the kind of shift to relentless, vivid colors like Dorothy saw in Munchkinland post-Kansas. The dates, the holidays, the birthdays, the landscape melting from spring into summer has been really hard. Even as I'm focused on how much better things are today, there's a natural grieving process in my practiced, naturally negative (and also sentimental) mind for the simplest of things, like, say, lunch being over, so big life changes get them big time. This is getting better, but it's slow.

I'm amazed that I've been able to be productive at all, considering the time I've spent involuntarily remembering things I've forgotten about where I was last year, how I felt (that's the worst, yuck, feelings), how I spent every day in a place of self-loathing and terror, no longer able to physically tolerate the consumption of a substance that I thought I needed to live.

I am grateful for those feelings now, for that terrifying physical experience, because it was so bad that the memory of it and the knowledge of how quickly I'd crash back into it if I brought alcohol back into my life again as anything other than a respected adversary and a cautionary tale is the solitary thing that has kept a drink out of my hands for a day shy of a year. (I am not celebrating until it's actually the 14th. A year is a year.)

It's the fundamental conundrum of the addict. That which kills you also seems to sustain you, has in fact done that in some way for so long that the thought of living without it (even while you're dying, while it's kicking your ass into oblivion, yes, even the wine on the top shelf and the better IPAs) is unthinkable. If I hadn't been numbed out somehow for all of those years how would I have survived these feelings, right? How? I'm really not sure. This is the part that seems the hardest, in my experience, for normal people to understand. I've read some unfortunate internet comment sections and heard some sketchy comments in real life about the deaths of Cory Monteith and Philip Seymour Hoffman that show me just how much people don't get it, either can't or won't, depending. Drugs aren't part of my story, but I relate to those guys anyway. They got lucky for periods of time, too. They found some grace along the way, and then it went away, and that was that. I want longer. I want my full allotment. I'm only almost a year old.

So yesterday I went back to Annapolis and I went to the same teeny park on a corner that I sat in front of last year. I felt like a fool, but I did it anyway, and it turned out okay. I sat in a corner spot at the restaurant where I ate with a friend on Saturday last year, and I had a club soda (three, actually.) and a dozen oysters and some crab dip. And when I had satisfied whatever I needed to by being in that place on this particular day, I left. I walked by a wine store and I looked up and I realized that it was actually the last place I'd ever bought wine, ever, and I marveled that even as a woman came out of the shop saying "Guys! It's a free tasting!" that I felt only the oddest ancient twinge, that my feet had zero urge to follow her, because they know, as connected as they are to my brain and my heart at this point in the service of taking me to the places where I need to be to get me where I need to go, that there is nothing but destruction in there for me behind some beautifully-designed labels.

I went instead to see some friends who help to keep me on the path I'm on and then I went home and went to sleep. It was a really good day.

(I wrote this post on July 13, 2013 and just found it in my drafts. I guess it wasn't time to hit publish yet.)

November 18, 2014

I would like to say I hate it, that after I quit every time that I put it down never to pick it up again. I'd like to say that I avoid secondhand smoke, and don't in fact hang around it just a few seconds longer than I need to, that my realization that cigarettes are the devil's handiwork and the product of a corrupt industry make me high five myself for giving them up and that I've never thought about doing it again at all because that would be stupid.

None of that is true.

I started smoking cigarettes in my senior year of high school, and like any overachiever I worked hard to get good at it. I set my late-'80s bangs on fire in my friend Nikki's Chevette, when a lighter that was set way too high set the front of my head up in flames along with my Marlboro Light. This did not deter me, and neither did watching my grandfather die of conditions related to ugly, painful emphysema that very year. I grew up watching my grandmother smoke, leaving her Salem Lights to burn in the ashtray hour after hour, and watched her struggle in later years with emphysema and vascular disease. My mother smoked when I was young, and so did my aunts and uncles. Cigarettes were a fixture in my life, so it really didn't seem like a big deal when I started, although the adults in my life didn't appreciate it at all, knowing by then what a bad deal it was, and one they did not want for me after all.

I was never even a pack a day smoker, but I did it every day for years. I loved smoking at concerts, and wherever and whenever I went out. I loved having a cigarette with a cup of coffee. I worked in a restaurant throughout college, and most people I knew in the service industry smoked. I liked kicking back and talking with friends who smoked, too, and lord how I loved to smoke when I drank.

I quit smoking in 1999, about 12 years after I picked it up, and I didn't do it for a long time after that, with a few lapses when I was out at bars or around other people who smoked. I even reached a point where I didn't like to be around it, where I'd smell smoke on other people's hair or clothes and turn into a judgy ex-smoker--a terrible reaction from a person who knows just how hard it is to quit and has no business being that way at all.

Then I quit drinking. Alcohol was a different beast of an addiction for me than smoking ever was and an infinitely more difficult problem to tackle, as it turned out. It trumped every other struggle in life and I knew I had to stay sober no matter what. There have been two times in my early sobriety when the choice narrowed down to a drink or a smoke (that really wasn't all there was at all, but our brains tell us insane things to keep us trapped in our addictions.) Once when I was brand new to life without alcohol and had no idea what to do with myself on a Saturday night when I felt at such loose ends, I drove north to the edge of Western Maryland, made the familiar sharp turn into a convenience store, and drove home smoking in the cold with the windows down. It felt, sadly, glorious. I kept it up until I got my first bout of bronchitis in the winter, and quit again until I had another brush with anxiety this summer and cigarettes seemed--again--like a preferable alternative to alcohol. You know, until I started to feel like crap again.

Because here's the thing: Smoking makes me sick. As much as I love doing it, as much as it still soothes me and gives me something to do with my overactive hands and mind and the mouth with so many words (so many) it eventually is what alcohol is for me, too, albeit one that will kill me more slowly: An instrument of illness and, worst case scenario, an untimely, painful death. In the years I smoked regularly, I got sick twice a year like clockwork--bronchitis that hung on and on and on, that just doesn't seem to do that when I'm not smoking, go figure. This time around my relapses were so brief that it didn't get that bad, but I could play the tape forward and know what would happen if I kept it up.

Less importantly, it's expensive now, yo. When I started smoking for miles uphill in the snow on my way to school, cigarettes were maybe $1.25 a pack. I could easily scrounge up enough quarters at the end of the night from my waitress apron to set me up with the Marlboro Lights I needed to get me through the next day. Now, this seven dollar business pains me. Seven dollars! For a pack of cigarettes. Silly.

But when you're addicted to something, the price doesn't matter, and neither do the risks, until they're bad enough, whatever that means for all of us, to inspire a difficult change. I am lucky that I've been able to quit smoking with some success multiple times, even with lapses back into what is such a tough addiction to kick. I have watched people I care about struggle to do the same thing with much less success, and I get it. It's so easy to keep doing it, and so difficult to stop, especially, because, as noted? I love it. It just really, really doesn't love me back, and that's more important these days than it's ever been, thankfully.

The American Cancer Society's 38th Great American Smokeout is Thursday, November 20. I'm really excited to be supporting it this year, because I've experienced the ups and downs of picking it up again after a long time, and know how hard it is, but how important it is, to keep it out of my life for good. I'm far from alone. The ACS says that tobacco use remains the single largest preventable cause of disease and premature death in the US, yet about 42 million Americans still smoke cigarettes — a bit under 1 in every 5 adults. That is a lot of bronchitis, emphysema, and cancer.

GASO is a good day to decide to quit, or to actually do it, but so is any day. The ACS is of course stacked with resources, including a phone line at 1-800-227-2345 where Cancer Information Specialists can answer questions 24 hours a day, with accurate, up to date information to help you make educated health decisions and connect with valuable resources. The Quit for Life Facebook page is a great spot to see what other people got back when they quit smoking, and there are a bunch of resources on the ACS site for people who are trying to quit, including a guide to quitting, hints for what to do when cravings hit, and tips for helping others who are trying to quit. I wish us all well.

This post represents a sponsored editorial partnership with the American Cancer Society. All storytelling and opinions are, of course, my own.

April 23, 2014

My mother and her brother were over at my grandmother’s house a day or so after she died. I was sitting at the table and I looked up at the top of the server, as she called it, a huge China closet on top of a chest of drawers, essentially. There were several photos up there, most of my cousin and his several kids, with a couple of me and my sister and our other cousin thrown in.

I saw a guy I didn’t recognize in a terrible orange Lucite frame shaped like the number 1 thrown in among the photos of all of us, and I asked my mother who that was, the guy in the number 1 frame? I don’t know, she said, maybe someone’s kid in the neighborhood from over the years, as my grandmother’s photo albums were crammed with literally hundreds of birth announcements and photos of birthdays, school years, weddings and graduations of her kids’ friends and the people who had come and gone from the neighborhood over the almost 70 years she lived in that house. It wasn’t unusual to see strange faces in the albums.

I got up and took the frame down and sat down with it to study it closer. It was the random paper picture that came with the frame. She had never taken it out or used it for anyone else.

“It isn’t anyone we know. It’s just the picture that came in the frame.”

My mother and her brother cracked up. They are both extremely loud.

“HAHAHAHAHA,” he bellowed. “She probably didn’t even know it wasn’t real! She probably felt bad cause she didn’t remember who he was and she kept him up there anyway. HAHAHAHAHA. She probably felt bad and left him up there with all of you guys.”

I looked down at him. An attractive young man, requisite senior picture, black suit, grayish background, hopeful, graduating stock photo smile, in an orange Lucite frame shaped like a number one.

“This is Cousin Number One,” I said. “He can stand for all of the random people who came in and out of here over the years. It was always someone. Might as well be him.”

My grandmother collected people. Some of them I liked, some of them I didn't. It's an odd tendency, this way of gathering in just as a matter of course. You end up with people who have nowhere else to go - people in some cases who no one else can really stand. As many times as I thought it was nice, I had lots of times where it was like, wow, who are you?

My mother’s brother took the pictures of his son and grandkids down from the top of the server. My mother took the ones of my sister and me. I stuck Cousin Number One in my purse. The symbolism was almost too much to take, but I wasn’t leaving him there.

I took him to her funeral a couple of days later, and in a move that further cemented my sister’s perceptions of me as teetering on the brink of weirdly eccentric and not just blithely neurotic, I took him out of my purse during the service and put him on the hymnal rack, an orange plastic number one guy staring straight at me from the back of the pew.

Strange, yeah, a little. I'm a strange girl at times. But looking at him kept me from completely losing it during the service and when I had to get up on the altar and read, I was pretty much okay and this was a room that I really did not want to lose it in.

He sat there, smiling, just like he did on the shelf at CVS or Michael’s or wherever someone bought that dreadful frame. He sits there today in my mother’s China closet, in with the dishes and the figurines, behind the mini-altar of photos of my grandmother that she put together for her after she died. He's a little bit towards the back, not so obvious in the shadows in the closet.

I like knowing he’s there. He’s everyone, or he could be. And he is not me.

I'm digging through some old posts because Listen to Your Mother Baltimore ruminating got me onto a link that led me to a link and then a few more from the days when I used to write all of the time, and a good bit of it was about the mothers in my life for awhile there. I'm also pretty sure that my recovery is sending me back over some spots that I need to check out, because I've forgotten some things. 2005 on was pretty rough, and the personal stuff really hit the fan in 2008. Looking back a little bit is all part of the healing. Context. That it--and I--wasn't all bad, that some of it was okay, that useful things happened, that there were reasons for the downward slide besides inevitability, are all good things to throw into the hopper. I'm reminded a lot of days by people who are wiser than I am to trust the process, that increased patience is critical for my peace of mind, and while I'm not so good at that at all, I really am trying. The stories are still important. Hopefully there will be some new ones soon here, like there are every day out here.

February 19, 2014

I never edit big camera photos on mobile, but this one ended up in my phone stream somehow and I can't get this place off of my mind, or the Buddha, or the green. I wrote a blog post about this day, and this picture. I would like to go back to this spot now, feeling and living like I do. I wonder if it would be different? It was cloudy and damp and beautiful, and I loved it anyway. Life is never all good or all bad, even when you don't feel them together at the time. Simple truth, but I'm pretty slow. Just figuring some things out now. #ojai #shootthebuddha #instastory365 47/365

February 05, 2014

I have way too much stuff, but only two possessions that mean enough to me that I transport them in my purse every time I move. (My iPhone doesn't count. It's like a limb.) My grandmother gave me this ring. I bought this copy of "Leaves of Grass" at a used book sale in Yellow Springs, Ohio many years ago. Material things aren't supposed to matter so much, I know, but I hope I can hold onto these two things for the rest of my life. #instastory365 30/365

January 28, 2014

This is one in an occasional series of reposts from my Instagram #Instastory365 project that I'm trying out this year. This one is from January 7, the day I got my first bill for health insurance in the mail after close to two years of no coverage. I had applied before the December 23 deadline, not believing at all that a simple application would result in health care coverage. I just pressed "send" and hoped for the best.

Just the phrase "coverage period" made no sense to my eyes. I had to read it several times before I believed it. I still do, from time to time. I'm very grateful.

I could go into detail about what today's mail meant to me, but I really don't think it would translate. Relieved is too small, grateful is fine all the time, but still not quite enough.

Every day now is a revelation of how bad things were in this one life before they started to get better. There's something to be said for feeling a part of life again. I can afford this insurance plan that was effective on January 1. I can take care of myself again, maybe better, and I can't adequately explain the relief. I can make decisions about my work with one huge, fear-based issue mostly off the table. I can accept that there are flaws in this, that my experience is my own alone, and for now, just feel good that I can breathe about something that yes, I can afford.

You can think you do, but you just never know what will happen to you in life, what you can lose, and what you will need. I take nothing for granted anymore. My perspective is completely different than it used to be, and anyway, I cried when I opened my mail tonight, is the thing.

December 12, 2013

Do you know that I went to preemptively add this post to the "Life" category, and I discovered that I don't have one?

I have written on this site for eight years and I don't have a life category. I have "Just Life" and "Lunacy" and "Daily Grind" and "Delicious Ambiguity" and all of this cutesy bullshit, and I don't have "Life." When people have asked me to justify what I write on the internet many times over the years, I've said that awkward thing that goes like "I write about my...life...I guess?" Or "Just...me...I guess?"

Why is it always "I guess"? Why? I am the shittiest guesser in the world. That "How many M&Ms?" game? Personal hell. I can't do math or relate to most things spatially in the physical world without Susan my GPS lady and a variety of apps, so anything pre-iPhone was a guessing fail, right? "A lot of M&Ms?" "A jar full of M&Ms?" I am the Amelia Bedelia of guessing. Also I am a fairly opinionated, mouthy person. I do not GUESS THINGS. I know THINGS ABOUT ME. So this whole dismissal of everything I did to satisfy a laundry detergent rep or someone in a booth with a...whatever gadget or thing or idea they had at the time? Or a person in the actual world who couldn't comprehend what a person without children or spouse or a point to prove in food or travel or whatever other tangible excuse to occupy internet real estate was doing here? I guessed for them. Stopping that now.

Someone who is important in my daily life now says to me often that I complicate things as a basic practice and I really need to stop if I want to feel better and do better. She also tells me that I need to learn to do normal people things like turn on bad movies and just watch them. I am not allowed to do anything else while I do this, because that misses the point.

These are the difficult tasks associated with rebuilding my entire little yet expansive life. I don't really know how to do fewer than two things at once, but it's not working out to be like that, so I have to try.

I just made a Life category.

And anyhow, I quit drinking. And some voice just popped up inside today (which is likely a higher power whom I choose to visualize and call Ozzy) that told me it was time to write it down here. I don't know if that's true, but it finally felt possible to come here and do that, so that is what I am doing. If this makes it out of draft and to the screen, please know that that felt very unlikely at this second, like the most unlikely thing ever in the history of LaurieWriteslandia. (Like Portlandia, with almost that much coffee, far less bicycling, green vegetation, and, sadly, Fred Armisen.)

I quit drinking because I was dying and I was miserable and I was hurting people for whom I would fight dogs, who in spite of my best efforts refused to stop caring about me and wanting to participate in my life. (The last part felt like the worst part, to which only someone else with an alcoholic brain -- we have holes in our brain, I read, did you know that? Literal holes -- may make sense.) I quit drinking because as dark and lonely and pointless and over as everything seemed in my life, I had glimmers of a sort. One happened when I was lying on a stretcher in an ER with one of my best friends in the world sitting there with me, because she is a saintly human being. I mean, this person belongs on a tapestry. And as deluded and insane and hypertensive and panic-stricken as I was, I laughed when the cute little ER doctor said "You are not trying to pull a Lohan, are you?" And then he handed me a pamphlet.

This is what I look like now. It's not much different. I still can't keep up with my roots, and can't get that closet door to close. I haven't moved dirty clothes out of the way for you guys in awhile.

I can't believe no one had ever handed me a pamphlet before. Things were really taking off!

And all I could think about was how many times I had joked about being "dehydrated and exhausted like Lindsay," which as it turns out is not at all funny until a doctor puts it into context for your drunk ass. Then it's pretty funny -- black humor, but that's my favorite.

(Jen had to remind me what he said, later, but in that moment I knew it exactly, both in terms of what the words strung together meant, and in the overall context of my life. It remains one of the tiny, glimmery touchstones on my road out of hell, one of the times I felt very distinctly that continuing to actively work on dying would be a bad idea, because I really want my full complement of years in which hilarious things happen. And I hope Lindsay's clean today. None of this is funny, man. It's a nightmare, an unfunny nightmare.)

So I don't drink today, and have not for five months of days. I have been miraculously mostly relieved of the compulsion each day for this many days to do something that defined my life and my behaviors and my every single annoying-as-fuck social media newsfeeds for as long as I can remember.

It is the hardest thing I have ever done, learning to live like a normal person. Have you ever hung out with me unmedicated? (I mean when you were, not me.) I am sorry. I apologize. This is no fried chicken church picnic. This is like a dry goth basement club. This is some kind of unwonderful. This is the opposite of every fun cliched thing I can think of right now.

But it is a miracle. It is a goddamned Tiny Tim holiday miracle, is what it is, and I can only hope that it continues to be so tomorrow, because as has been hammered home to me by necessity, only today is promised, and even that is an hour by hour affair.

I should be afraid of talking about this here, maybe, but the thing is that I am more afraid of not talking about this here. I am afraid of dressing it up in some charming, Narnian half-fictional dreamy bullshit prose and not saying it plainly, of which I am entirely capable. Because you know, that shit poured from my fingers when I was drunk, and it was an essential component of the entire imaginary world that worked for a long, long time to assist me in trying to kill myself. I bought into the notion that I had to dress it up, more and more and more as things got so, so terrible. Reading and writing are wonderful tools of fantasy and escape, but when you start trying to tell your own story backwards and better to yourself and other people than it is? That's when things can go really wrong, or likely already have, and you just can't deal with it any other way.

At least that is what is true for me. I am learning not to speak for other people.

The easy, perfect, simple, truth is that words are all I've got, and when they are plain and true, that is when things roll along better in my world. I work in pictures, too, sure, and I like it. I'm medium-sized good at that, which means I have crazy respect for it, because it intimidates me and I know I need to work so much harder at it to get better. But this words thing is what I know. This is what I can absolutely do, what I have absolutely been able to do since I was able to do things. I have confidence in it, and equal confidence in the fact that if I don't use my words to express basic truths of my life, I can't get to the other stuff. I don't know if this is right or how it should be, but I'm not as hung up on that now as how things simply are. Without this part, I'm not as good at telling other stories, or to work in other, potentially more income-producing, activities, and that is really essential to keep things going around here. I know that now.

Tom Cruise spoke John Grisham's smushy line in The Firm about his Jeanne Tripplehorn-played wife, that things "weren't real" until he told them to Abby. Somewhere along the line this part became relevant to me and my blog, as well, and when I sit with myself honestly I have to admit that it's still the case. I just quoted a novel that I read 20 years ago and referenced an actor who has no relevance to my life anymore to make a point, so you can see that things are still a little touch and go around here.

But it's true. It's all true, and maybe if I do this it'll feel more real, maybe even better. Maybe I can really work out the job thing that feels all jammed up in my head, which I 'm told is normal for now. Do you know how often I'm told that things that feel completely awful and unbearable are "normal for now"? A lot of times, from people I really don't even feel like punching in the face, because I know they are interested in me feeling better, and in reveling in the fact that somehow, some way, I've figured out how to save my life, right smack in the middle of it, when that really didn't feel possible at all.

As I said here the last time I dropped by, it really is that dramatic, and that boring.

It feels weirder than I thought it would to say this to the internet out loud, but it's time to get on the other side of it and talk about other things. It should have felt worse and scarier to be who I was for the years before this, not the day we're in now. And what I do know for sure like Oprah knows things for sure is that for all the things I'm afraid of, I am not afraid of you, whomever you are. It turns out that I have lived a life based in terror of absolutely everything for almost 43 years, and if there is one thing that my Ozzy-powered, ramshackle, imperfectly designed but good for me program of recovery (because I have not had a drink today and 99.9 percent don't want one, which is CRAY Y'ALL) tells me it is that I am not afraid of writing on the internet. I can't really afford to be afraid of anything else, either, for that matter anymore, but I can start with the stuff that was never that scary to begin with.

I do not guess this. I know.

(*It's important that I note for the record that my experiences are mine alone, and do not reflect those of any other person or organization. I speak for myself only. Why and how other people get and stay sober can look similar, but is, more importantly, completely different. Of other human beings involved in my story, I will only say that I am grateful for every single bit of help, and how the universe has moved to make good things possible. My only job is to give back. Beyond that, nothing else is my business.)

November 01, 2013

I wrote this post a year and nine months ago. I was so unhappy then, dying physically and emotionally faster than any 41-year-old woman ought to be.

It makes me so sad to read it, so sad for that poor, sad, chasing-after-the-wrong-things girl, sad on a level that makes me suck in my stomach like I got punched.

And yet, I'm so, so grateful, more than I can tell you, more than this scary blank text box can express by any means, ever. I'm so concurrently happy and giddy and STUPID with this new gratitude that there were other possibilities, that something beyond the confines of my brain and body was at work to conspire for my good when I absolutely could not, although that's certainly what I thought I was doing, what I've thought I've been doing all along. My circuits were jammed. My picker -- for people, for places, for trustworthy sources of, well, almost everything good, both inside and outside of myself -- was smashed.

Things were sideways, all the time, and now they are a little less so. I'm still picking and choosing the words for how they were and how they are, because that latter thing is, as I know it must be now, a shape-shifter. It shot out of something way, way bigger than me and is taking its own form now, housed in the body of a woman who is really, for now, just along for the very daily ride.

I'm more protective of what I say than I have ever been, which is to say that I'm protective at all. I'm more interested in who I talk to and what my words mean, too, not just for me, but for the people I'm lobbing them at, the people I'm tacitly asking to engage, I guess, at least to some extent. I'm not as into barfing them all out into the void as I used to be, for various reasons, but mostly because (and this is freedom) I don't have to anymore, for any particular reason. I don't need it like I did. I don't really need it at all. That part was, shockingly to me, one of the easiest to let go (as I realize as I type this is true of most of the things I thought were the most crucial, particularly in the last few years of driving my psychic car repeatedly into the same old walls. People are sort of inherently dumb, bless our lumbering hearts.)

That doesn't mean I don't miss it sometimes, though. It doesn't mean blogging hasn't been really good for me and to me, in most of the ways that matter. It's still pretty much the easiest thing I can do. And so today when I came across the Bukowski poem again today that I quoted at the top, and it reminded me of this post, I let it lead me back to here, and I started typing.

you can’t beat death butyou can beat death in life, sometimes.

Word, and also, hi. That's mostly what's been going on around here. I've been kind of busy, beating death in life. It's as dramatic and as basic and boring as it can be, at the same time.

I may try this every day thing again, I may not, but at least for today, I did.

October 17, 2013

Disclosure: This is my second post for World Food Program USA. My first was n December 2012 for the Fill the Cup program. I truly believe in what they're doing for kids and families around the world, and it is my privilege to lend my words to a cause that should be supported, in my opinion, by anyone anywhere. No child should ever go hungry.

I complain about packing my lunch all the time. All. The. Time.

I know that I'm not alone in this. Every year, when school starts again, I read parents on Twitter and Facebook and in my in-person life complaining about the end of summer and the start of another year of lunch-packing for at least one small person who heads out the door to school every day.

Also? I, shamefully, waste a lot of food. I buy produce and it spoils because I don't cook it or eat it in time. I've even, on some occasions, brought my lunch and let it sit because a colleague proposed going out to lunch at the last minute, and hey, I'm not eight shades of crazy, just a few. When it comes down to the social aspect of lunch, I'm an easy convert. I would always rather pop over to the deli with someone whose company I enjoy than sit in my office eating my cold chicken from last night. Besides, the deli I'm talking about has these reuben sandwiches that make my life better, and a pickle bar and, well, you know where this is headed, I'm sure.

It's obvious what a stupid problem this is, right? It's a problem that's not even a problem at all, just an irritation that springs straight up out of privilege with a great big side of lazy. The truth is that I'm lucky enough to have access to the food I've got in my fridge and my cabinets. I'm lucky enough that my problem is irritation at "having" to pack a lunch, and not a worry that when I go into my kitchen, there won't be anything there to take with me to the job I'm also lucky to have. I'm lucky to be able to be the kind of jerk who buys fresh food and wastes it.

This is all of the stuff that I've been thinking about since I learned about World Food Program USA's Lunch Money Challenge, a project that encourages bringing lunch to work this week and donating those savings to the World Food Program's School Lunch program.

This is on my mind when I read about kids in places like Honduras, Niger, and Kenya, kids who often don't have anything to take with them when they go to school, and go to schools where the ability to provide lunch for the students is a challenge, too.

This is why I did manage to bring my lunch this week, the three days of each week that I'm actually in an office and not working from home. (Thursday and Friday technically don't count, because I'm generally eating lunch at home, if not bringing it anyhere else. I am going to try not to eat out this week, even if someone says they want to go somewhere really good and they want me to join them.) (And that, my friends, is more privilege. I can clearly see the patterns here.)

What are your lunch plans this week? If you'd like to participate in the program, it's actually pretty easy.

Step 4: Spread the word and reach out to family and friends through email, Facebook and Twitter
Hashtag: #feedadream
WFP USA Twitter: @WFPUSA

If you're like me and you like specifics, you should know that this program has immediate impact on people's lives. It changed the life of Fatuma Mohammed, whom I was lucky enough to speak with on the phone last week.

Fatuma has been a staffer in Kenya at the World Food Program since 2005, working to ensure accountability and transparency in food distributions, supervising other staff
and coordinating WFP activities with partner organizations. Fatuma also benefited from the School Lunch Program from the time she was seven years old, when she and her siblings began receiving porridge at school daily. Now she is a parent, and works to help bring the same nourishment to other children.

Hunger is a solvable problem, and school meal programs are a solution proven to work. Every year, WFP provides school meals to 22 million children in 60 countries. But that covers only a fraction of the need. There are 66 million primary-school children across the globe, including 23 million in Africa alone, who come to school hungry each day.

July 18, 2013

While the "You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone" cliche may come in most handily and frequently in discussions of romantic relationships, rest assured that it works for health insurance, too.

Other things you might miss once they're not there anymore include sick leave, paid time off, and a chunk of a bi-weekly paycheck I took for granted for a very long time.

Like many idealistic people who dare to dream of occupational change at mid-life, I let these things go on purpose, because I did not feel that there was an alternative other than staying in my job, where I was increasingly unhappy, to keep them.

Two degrees and 20 years after I left a path of what was then print journalism behind, I came back with new media bells on into the field as an entrepreneurial journalist. This was better known before the fancy-job-name days of the Internet as a freelance writer, editor, and occasional photographer, which is still what I consider myself more than anything else. I just do all of this stuff on the Internet now.)

So I could pursue these activities that were taking up more and more of my time and brain space than teaching, last year I left my job as a full-time college faculty member. I had a plan in place for a solid year of financial survival -- or at least I thought I did. (First lesson: Read ALL of the fine print of ALL of your plans. No skimming allowed.) It wasn't the wisest possible choice financially according to a few of my good friends, and it certainly wasn't as far as my parents were concerned.

But at 41, with a relatively new journalism master's degree in my hand, a handful of dedicated writing and social media clients, and the ability to waitress if I had to (I told myself), I walked out of my classroom. I also, in no particular order, left my health insurance, retirement plan, paid time off, other ancillary benefits, and oh, yes, my full-time paycheck, to give my media business the shot that I believed it deserved.

So let's cut to the chase:

I have had an amazing year in many ways. I learned so much more than I had imagined about myself and about other people. I traveled. I loved not having to commute or wear what I call "grown-up" clothes to my desk in my home office.

I worked consistently, to no one's greater surprise than my own. I hustled more because I had to, and it paid off.

I got new clients and worked with old ones. Networking became a way of life instead of a necessary evil for the hobbyist writer, editor, and blogger I'd been for seven years. It turned out that I'd really been networking all along -- whether I knew it or not -- because once media colleagues I'd worked with for years knew I was free for assignments? Some of them actually hired me.

This winter, I hit a rough patch, and I did have to wait tables again.

When I accepted that restaurant work was not working for my body or my mind at this age, a part-time position in education was there for me again, so I went back behind a desk and in front of a dry-erase board to work with students.

I've been an adjunct teacher and counselor before, so I knew the drill in my distant memory. I knew what came true: that this time I don't even have my own computer, much less a dedicated office. Time off is entirely unpaid, and I don't really even have it to take. I work when I'm scheduled, and I teach when I'm scheduled. The functions of my job are similar to what they were before, and certainly no easier, but suffice to say that the compensation is not, and neither are the benefits, not by a long shot.

When I first lived a pretty typical part-time academic life of cobbling together a few jobs at a time, a couple of campuses and one other totally unrelated gig in a newsroom, I didn't have insurance, either, and I swore it was the last time.

This is why you really shouldn't swear, I guess.

I consider myself very lucky to be having the experiences I've had since I left full-time academic work, because even though it was flexible and had many perks, it was exactly that: a full-time commitment that prevented me from doing much of anything else.

Since I quit my traditional job, I have actually worked harder than I have in my life. It takes initiative, creativity, and constant intellectual and interpersonal effort to build a business, not only the actual work that you do but the building of the infrastructure so that it can serve you financially as well.

The work? That's been the joy. My new assignments have involved things like being quite close to a fire eater and building vibrant communities of writers and creative thinkers online. I've had the time and flexibility -- if not the previous disposable income -- to travel. I've learned a lot about my ability to pursue tough goals and what I'm willing to give up to make that happen. (Short answer: more than I thought.)

I still have some really tough decisions to make this year. I've navigated the initial stages of applying for health insurance, for instance, a priority at the top of my list. I've learned that it's not easy to do privately, it is expensive, and I understand better the looks on people's faces when I said I was leaving my plan behind. I stalk the Federal Government's insurance marketplace portal for a sign, any sign, that better days are ahead. I'm also learning to cope with the other stuff, the lack of sick days in the nonexistent piggy bank, for instance, and the need to budget freelance income for the times when it's not flowing in for one reason or another.

But it's difficult. I know that a full-time job, with the (possible) safety nets of leave, insurance, and retirement vesting that I'd come to count on beyond what I was aware, is a possibility -- if I can find one, that is. I also know that some people believe that as a single woman of a certain age with no trust fund or secret to sell for millions of dollars, I'm an idiot for walking away, and I'm an idiot for not racing immediately back to something, anything, that will replace what I had that was really, in some ways, still just getting me from paycheck to paycheck in this economy.

Hardest for me is the concept that I should race back to a compromise of creativity and ambition, because in middle age, with too many years in, that is what it's my lot to do.

I'm not ready to admit that yet, I guess, not while I can still squeak out my rent and my car payment, things that I guess shouldn't be concerns for me this many years in, but here we are. Check back with me next quarter, I guess. I'm figuring this one out absolutely one day at a time.

This post is part of BlogHer's Women at Work editorial series, made possible by AFL-CIO.

July 11, 2013

It's July and it's some weird combination of hot and humid and rain either looming or half-heartedly happening around these parts right now, so it makes perfect sense that I'd post a video from Snowmageddon 2010, specifically the part where I ventured out between our two mother storms to try to buy groceries.

This clip is embarrassing to me. I look like a person who has been trapped inside for two weeks and yet somehow is not rested, although I had nothing but time to sleep for lo those many days (true.) My roots, oh, how they haunt me, as ever. (Always true.) I hate watching myself on video (also true.) But when Stimey tells me to do something, I listen. And what she told me to do, after she posted a Facebook mini-rant about grocery shopping, was to tell me to post mine. So I'm doing it, embarrassment be damned.

But I haven't written about grocery shopping, or shopping, or anything much of anything, here in a long time. Now I just post old videos where I'm talking about it. Who says the medium -- or I -- haven't evolved?